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The MiddletownRemix: Hear More, See More – A Festival of Art and Sound, a massive event that the CFA has been preparing for for an entire year, is finally happening this Saturday afternoon! It is a celebration of the city’s acoustic identity, and will feature four world premieres of works commissioned for the festival, three live DJ sets, two art/sound installations, a laptop orchestra, a flash mob dance, food trucks, graffiti art, improv sketches, and a gallery walk.

When: Saturday, May 11, 2013 from 2 pm to 5 pm (be sure to arrive by 2:30 for the flashmob)Where: Festival Information Center will be located in front of It’s Only Natural Market at 575 Main StreetAdmission cost: FreeFacebook: here

This is a special chance for the university and town to come together and engage with one another on a more personal and interactive level than is usually possible. List of exhibits and events, map, flashmob dance video, and relevant links after the jump.

The final First Friday program, sponsored by the Center for Community Partnerships, will feature the students in Ron Schatz’s Middletown History service-learning course. The event will take place on Friday, May 10th at 4:30 PM in Room 004 of Wesleyan’s Allbritton Center, located at 222 Church St. All Wesleyan and Middletown community members are welcome to attend.

The students presenting and their subjects are as follows:

Ross Levin ’15: the 1912 strike at Russell Manufacturing Company

Earl Lin ’15: Mayor Stephen Bailey’s urban renewal plan

Adam Marcu ’13: the workmen in Portland’s brownstone quarries

Kyle Roosa ’13: late 19th-century Middletown philanthropy

Zachary Vinci ’15: Middletown’s patriots in the Revolutionary War

Yanru Wang ’13: the establishment of Middletown High School in the 1840s

In case you’re wondering what in the world ended up in front of Usdan this morning, it’s a camera obscura — that is, a darkened chamber in which the outside world around it is projected upside-down once the light from the surroundings passes through a little peephole in one of its walls, in the same way that an old camera works. It was made by two Middletown artists, Joe McCarthy and Peter Albano (who have engaged in other neat artistic projects, such as mapping the underground Hog River found beneath Hartford, CT) for the MiddletownRemix Festival, happening this Saturday, May 11th from 2 to 5 p.m. (more info on that after the jump). As Aletta Brady ’15 elucidates in an interview she conducted with the artists:

They described their project for the MiddletownRemix festival as “pinhole photography, just on a much larger scale — a pinhole camera that you can walk inside of. The sound element going on will [make it] a full sensory experience inside the camera”.

As mentioned above, this is no normal camera obscura: in addition to the visual aspect of it, it also includes recordings of sounds from Middletown that were collected as part of the MiddletownRemix Project. In essence, those who walked in are experience both the soundscapes of Middletown along with a representation of their surroundings.

Aletta’s full interview with the artists can be found here, and more information about the MiddletownRemix Festival can be found after the jump. Students are welcome to walk into the camera obscura and experience the sounds and visuals Monday through Wednesday until 6 p.m.

A message from Pamela Tatge at the CFA about a great event happening Tuesday:

Celebrate the writing excellence of students in Middletown Public Schools, grades 6 through 12, and hear their winning submissions of essays, short stories and poetry from the annual literary magazine, Silent Sounds. Middletown High theater students will be reading excerpts of the writers winning submissions.

The Center for the Arts has been publishing books compiling students’ works for the past 13 years in collaboration with the English Department of Middletown Public Schools, with support from Community And University Services for Education. This event is co-sponsored by the Center for the Arts, Community and University Services for Education, and the Middletown Public Schools Cultural Council.

Ari Ebstein ’16 is inviting you to come to the Middletown Potluck tonight in 200 Church from 5:30-8:00. Presenters from the Middletown Historical Society and Wesleyan Professor of History Ronald Schatz will be presenting and leading discussions about Middletown’s history. All they ask is that you “bring homies, and food if you’d like.”

The CFA is organizing the MiddletownRemix Festival, an event to celebrate the city’s acoustic identity, and feature four world premieres of works commissioned for the festival, three live DJ sets, two art/sound installations, a laptop orchestra, food trucks, and gallery walk. The event will happen on the afternoon of May 11th, and a major part of the festivities is a flashmob dance to a song by DJ Arun Ranganathan and choreographed by Kelsey Siegel ’13,for which the CFA just released the video so people can learn it!

To help spread the work, Kelsey will be holding a flashmob dance rehearsal this Sunday at 3PM behind Fayerweather Hall. Come learn it so you can take part in the main part of the festival! And if you can’t make it to the rehearsal, you can learn the dance thanks to the video. For more information on the event, click here.

The CFA hopes you will join Eiko Otake, a Wesleyan Creative Campus Fellow and MacArthur Genius Grant Recipient, for a free movement workshop open to all Wesleyan students, faculty and staff. Delicious Movement is a quiet, slow-paced, creative practice that anyone can join – you only need to bring your body and a willingness to move it. Eiko has recently performed with her partner Koma at MoMA, the Walker Art Center and the Joyce Theater. Join us for this unique movement experience!

Given recent discussions about Wesleyan’s relationship with the Middletown community, the WSA’s Middletown Wesleyan Relations Committee (known as “MidWes”) is inviting students to the Middletown-Wesleyan Relationship Student Summit, happening this Saturday April 27th from 1-3 PM in Albritton 311:

The summit will be an interactive and collaborative meeting between students who have been involved in Middletown (or who have an interest in doing so) and the members of the WSA’s Wesleyan-Middletown Relations Committee, known as “MidWes.” A primary goal of this gathering is to find ways to strengthen the town-university relationship, namely by fostering more collaboration among students who are involved in the Middletown community.

As an added bonus, there will be free and delicious vegetarian food from Udupi, a local southeast Indian restaurant, and the summit will end in time to celebrate Holi on Foss Hill!

As many of us recall from the November Diversity University: In Theory and Practice forum (full video can be found here), issues and questions regarding diversity and inclusion at Wesleyan have been very prominent this year. WSA President Zach Malter ’13 would like members of the Wesleyan community to come together once again to talk about the progress that has been made since last semester’s forum, and what more has to be done in order for Wesleyan to live up to its “Diversity University” title, specifically as it relates to the classroom experience. In his own words:

The follow-up to last semester’s Diversity University: In Theory and In Practice, this panel will allow students to engage with prominent faculty members and administrators on the most pressing campus climate issues. The focus will be on issues of diversity as they relate to the classroom experience, but the conversation will by no means be limited to that.

The event will take place this Wednesday at 7PM in Exley 150. The moderator will be Professor Lisa Dierker, and the confirmed moderators are: